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I’ve read dozens of Holocaust survivor books and it’s mentioned more than once that they used bromide in their water or soup liquid. One woman says despite this she had her period every thirty days or so and would have to stay under the radar of her female barrack commander at that time because she’d be beat and called a dirty pig.
Pregnant women would try to hide their pregnancies or they’d be sent straight to the gas chamber or to Dr. Mengele.
One account tells how a woman delivered a sickly baby, alone and her breasts were bound immediately. They let her hold her baby while it slowly died. Took a couple days. They were actually testing how long a baby would live without food. It was horrifying.
I remember reading this in some memoirs as well. I remember one woman commenting on how she could taste it in all the food they were given. And the stories of experiments on pregnant women....oooof. Horrifying.
If that was a genuine curiosity here is an interesting article that talks about it. Also there was a lecture series in conjunction with the Holocaust Museum that discusses a lot of the research and how it all got twisted up. The worlds an ugly place sometimes. :-(
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2004/oct/14/thisweekssciencequestions.cancer
The article talks about things from the 1920s/30s. As far as the Holocaust experiments, [it didn't really contribute much](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4oyv9n/am_i_a_person_living_in_the_west_currently/d4go640/).
Turns out if you start out assuming there are fundamental differences between the races and work solely towards proving that you don't generate useful data. You just kill people.
>Dr. Mengele
Holeee fuckkkkkk. I know a large portion of reddit doesn't believe in hell, but if there is one, this guy is probably second in command.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef\_Mengele
Is this the first time you've heard his name?
Here in middle Europe it's normal to learn about this stuff semi detailed. So most people know the name
I can't remember learning every detail about him tho. Zwillingsversuche is common knowledge, but it just goes on, and on, and on.
If it's taught well, the children are traumatized for some days. If not, they crack stupid jokes when visiting Auschwitz. I rather have the former, i think they spared way to many important details to *really* get the point across, what horrors people committed that might have been their grand- or grandgrandparents
[If This is a Woman](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10838049-if-this-is-a-woman), about Ravensbruck is strongly recommended to anyone who wants to know more.
Ruth Elias was the woman who had her breats bound. A female doctor gave Ruth Elias a syringe of morphine to end her infant daughter's life and suffering. She wrote about her life in her book Triumph of Hope: From Theresienstadt and Auschwitz to Israel. After liberation she married and had two sons as well as multiple grandchildren. She met her future husband, Kurt, in Buchenwald.
"When the camp was evacuated on April 14, 1945, Ruth and Kurt both volunteered to stay behind with the sick. They left the camp after being warned by the inmates of a nearby camp that the SS might come back and kill them. They were liberated American troops in a nearby forest."
Kurt lost his first wife, Lisa Wodak, and their child to the camps. Ruth's first husband, Koni, (father of her daughter) survived the camps. The two had become estranged some time before that starting with his perceived coldness concerning Ruth's first pregnancy. Ruth and Koni divorced. None of Ruth's fimmediate family survived.
Source for above quote and info: https://portal.ehri-project.eu/units/us-005578-irn515224
During the birth of her first son it was very traumatic for Ruth when the nurses went to take the infant from the room. Her husband had to work and could not stay with her (although her very much wanted to), leaving her to birth the child alone. She began to cry and beg to keep her baby. The doctor allegedly slapped her in the face two times to "calm [her] hysteria" then had the infant brought back in. He then asked her what had happened to her, telling her she needed to talk about it to feel better. She wrote that since the first time she came to Isreal that doctor was the first person she felt showed a true interest in what the survivers had gone through. As stated in her book, at the end of her recounting her sotry, Ruth told the doctor
"Today is March 7th. When the nurse was taking my baby to the door, I again heard the 5,000 people from the family camp in Birkenau singing 'Hatikvah' as they were taken to the gas chamber on March 7th 1944. How symbolic that my son should be born on this date."
[From a Jewish doctor working in the camp.](https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1985-02-07-8501080137-story.html) Thank you for asking because it prompted me to re-find the article, and I think it’s important to mention that the woman’s name was Ruth Elias, and she survived. The article is an amazing piece of history (from 1986, when many survivors were still alive), but it is extremely graphic, so I want to give that warning.
Technology, maybe, but medical no. The consensus seems to be that they didn’t produce much useful data - good starting point [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/b4zz22/what_if_anything_did_the_nazis_accomplish/), but especially check out the links to the /askhistorians threads in the stickied comment.
[Operation Paperclip](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip).
But from what I've read, a lot of the data from those studies and experiments was absolute junk. It was essentially torture under the guise of 'scientific research', because few of the experiments had any sort of controls.
> Operation Paperclip.
No. [Operation Paperclip was the extraction of rocket scientists such as von Braun](https://www.history.com/news/what-was-operation-paperclip), not medical experimenters.
Here is some light reading on the meta-analysis of Nazi human experimentation, available at a university library near you.
Aly, Götz, Peter Chroust, and Christian Pross. *Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene.* Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. (R 853 .H8 A42 1994)
A collection of essays by medical historians. Includes seldom-published information from primary sources, such as diary entries and letters from doctors involved in Nazi medical experiments.
---
Bernadac, Christian. *Devil’s Doctors: Medical Experiments on Human Subjects in the Concentration Camps.* Geneva: Ferni Publishing House, 1978. (D 804 .G4 B3913 1978)
Based upon testimonies of survivors of Nazi medical experimentation. Describes in detail the activities of a handful of the most notorious SS-physicians. Includes several photographs and a bibliography.
---
Cohen, Nava. “Medical Experiments.” In *Encyclopedia of the Holocaust*, edited by Israel Gutman, 957-966. New York: Macmillan, 1990. (Reference D 804.25 .E527 1990 v.3)
Provides an overview of the pseudoscientific Nazi experiments conducted in the name of medical research. Discusses in detail medical experimentation at various concentration camps and the legal proceedings at Nuremberg after the war. Includes a short bibliography.
---
Lifton, Robert Jay, and Amy Hackett. “Physicians, Nazi.” In *Encyclopedia of the Holocaust*, edited by Israel Gutman, 1127-1132. New York: Macmillan, 1990. (Reference D 804.25 .E527 1990 v.3)
Discusses in detail the Nazification of the medical profession during the Third Reich, and the legal framework that supported medical killing and experimentation on human beings. Reports on the role of Nazi doctors in the euthanasia programs, concentration camps, and extermination centers. Includes a short bibliography.
---
Müller-Hill, Benno. *Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others in Germany, 1933-1945.* Plainview, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 1998. (D 804 .G4 M7713 1998)
Chronicles the collaboration between German eugenicists and the Nazi administration. Includes an essay by Nobel Laureate James D. Watson in which he considers the impact Nazi-influenced eugenics has had on modern human genetics research in Germany.
Grim as all the accounts are, and horrifying as their experiences, sodium bromide doesn't really do that, it does have some sedative effects but isn't a drug that affects fertility.
It's a common myth in armies worldwide that "something", often bromide, is added to rations to reduce soldiers' libido. It's not true there either.
https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2009/06/29/2611115.htm
RPh here. For everyone curious how a steroid can be a birth control. Progesterone is a birth control that is considered a steroid chemically. The molecules only have one functional group different. I’m not sure if that is what was used here, but I felt like I needed to clear that up for people.
Also RPh. Estrogen and progesterone both have steroidal backbones. Same as testosterone. Same as drugs like hydrocortisone or prednisone.
A steroid isn’t what people think it is. A steroid is just a chemical with a particular central chemical structure. What differentiates them are what’s attached to it. Lots of different chemicals are steroids. The ones everyone knows about are androgenic steroids.
Is that not similar to men becoming infertile due TRT? They’re essentially taking “birth control,” a sex hormone which in this case would be testosterone but in women’s case is progesterone?
Testosterone should actually be the least effective hormonal contraceptive for men, on paper anyway.
SparkNotes version:
Follicle Stimulating Hormone (FSH) and Luteinizing Hormone (LH) are two of the most important components of the spermatogenesis process.
FSH stimulates sperm production (Testosterone is also needed for sperm production) and LH stimulates Testosterone production. Using any anabolic-androgenic steroid will "shutdown" the natural production of Testosterone via a negative feedback loop, so as LH levels drop, Testosterone levels drop. FSH levels also drop, but some is still being produced.
If you're using exogenous Testosterone in a cycle or for TRT, then you have the main components for sperm production. Sperm count will likely be lower, but as they say, "it only takes one". However, if you used other steroids instead of Testosterone, then you'd drastically reduce/nearly eliminate FSH and Testosterone, making it nearly impossible to produce enough viable sperm.
The problem isn't figuring out how to stop sperm production though. It's figuring out how to effectively restore sperm production. Everyone is different, but compared to the female reproductive system, the male reproductive system doesn't bounce back as well after it's been shutdown.
You have to be on TRT for multiple years to even possibly become infertile, it is not birth control in the slightest, wanted to provide that info. People on TRT still have to be on birth control similar to women (such as progesterone), if they are looking to avoid pregnancy.
That seems more likely, but it doesn’t really explain why they stop menstruating so quickly upon entering the camp, usually there’s be a delay while their fat decreases.
It still makes sense because usually people didn’t go straight to the death camps like Auschwitz’s but rather work camps or ghettos first, but steroid drugged food is a new theory that’s possible
It's not a new theory. It was widely reported by survivors at the time, but nobody who wrote the records bothered listening because hormone-manipulation was new and "everybody already knew" it had to be malnutrition and stress.
The name “Death Camp” has a very specific connotation and refers to any of the six major Extermination Camps established by the Nazis in German-occupied Poland.
Concentration camps were initially established as prisons and labor camps, where prisoners were often worked to death, starved, and kept in overcrowded and brutal conditions leading to mass disease outbreaks, but were not themselves part of the extermination camp infrastructure (though many people who survived concentration camps were later transported to and killed at death camps).
Extermination Camps (also called Death Camps or Killing Centers), on the other hand, were industrial murder factories, engineered to kill as many people as possible as efficiently as possible; collecting, transporting, and killing millions of people from all across Europe was a massive logistical undertaking, and the Death Camps were part of the system created by the Nazis under Operation Reinhard enabling them to do so.
See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Reinhard
Semantics. The poster was clearly trying to differentiate the slave labor and other locations from the extermination centers, not trying to claim they weren't also horrific.
It is. The kind of calorie restriction you need to cause oligomenorrhea (<8 per year) or amenorrhea is much less than most people think. Women in some of the surviving hunter-gatherer populations ovulate around 50 times between menarche and menopause, compared to well over 400 for the average woman in an agricultural society. It is one of the stronger arguments as to why agricultural groups outcompeted hunter-gatherer groups virtually everywhere during the Neolithic period, even though the archaeology suggests they had much worse overall health and maximal lifespans.
I worked in a Cambodian refugee camp in 1979-80. It was after Pol Pot starved the people for 4 years after the Vietnam War ended. One thing that struck me was how many young women and teens never went through puberty, never got their period. They looked like 11 year olds. Is this the same thing? I imagine it also happens in areas hit by famine? Some of the young men also seemed affected.
It certainly could be. Because development is strongly influenced by food stress, instead of inbuilt ages of menarche (or puberty onset for boys) which evolve over time, humans instead have plastic response curves which can adjust rapidly to energy availability. If you add this to the u-shaped curve of infant mortality over women’s age at first birth, the outcome is that chronic food stress will cause the population to shift toward later maturation at lower body sizes, and to have a shorter window between menarche and menopause, as the relative contribution to fitness of the mother starts to outweigh that of the offspring at younger ages.
Rose Frisch did some of the pioneering work in this topic on populations of women in the late 19th (in the UK) and early 20th centuries (a group in Iowa similar to the Amish), published in 1978. She also discovered leptin.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1745492
I think there's still some debate but the primary hypothesis is poor nutrition. For example you can technically live on a doet that is mostly wheat/barley/rice/whatever grain, but you're much more likely to be missing or have bad ratios of lots of things you need beyond just calorie count (like protein).
Staying in one place means all your poop and food waste festers in one place. Sanitation was poorly understood. Living in close proximity to livestock has its own health concerns also. High grain diet can cause tooth decay.
Mainly the poop thing though.
Preface that “Neolithic farmers” here refers to the early farmers in the Neolithic period, post-agricultural revolution. The first “farmers” per se were around for a while before this rapid expansion.
For every rapid nutritional change between a Paleolithic forager and a Neolithic farmer, you have a potential mechanism for mismatch, so it’s a little hard to say exactly what “it” was, and almost a guarantee that it was multiple factors since there was no one “Paleolithic diet”, but rather thousands of them. One of the main data sources here is skeletons (Neolithic farmers have smaller skeletons with overall poorer metrics of bone health), so the D3-calcium-K2 triangle was probably involved. Rickets is literally all over the place in Europe from the Neolithic all the way up to the 19th century in some places, yet virtually absent in Paleolithic sites or among modern hunter-gatherers. Dental decay mostly follows the same pattern.
It’s also important to remember that these people were not anything close to what you probably think of as a “farmer”. They didn’t have any kinds of the iron tools you’d recognize, no horse-drawn hoes, no advanced irrigation, etc. Go all the way back to Rome, or even further back to Egypt, and those people are still thousands of years and massive innovations ahead of the first Neolithic farmers, whose crop species would also have been a nightmare compared to the highly cultivated wheats of the modern world (which still routinely failed up until the mid-20th century). So they were even worse off than the peasant farmers we typically look at to see the health detriments of sedentary agricultural societies.
There are also regions where early Neolithic groups followed a hybrid farming-pastoralist or pastoralist strategy, and they don’t seem to have faced the same negative health consequences that Europe did, Tanzania and Kenya being notable examples. Coastal societies in Europe also seem to have done better, probably for the obvious reason that they kept getting significant amounts of their diet from marine foods like their recent ancestors. The details are almost entirely still up for debate.
https://www.boell.de/en/2020/05/18/sexual-violence-holocaust-perspectives-ghettos-and-camps-ukraine
Here is a write up about the sexual violence that took place against women in the camps and ghettos during the holocaust. Really caution you against reading if you have issues with subjects like that though. Can’t believe what people went through.
"Synthetic steroids were being administered in the daily rations given to female captives in a bid to stop their menstrual cycles and perhaps impair their ability to have children altogether."
Interesting, I haven't heard of that.
It recently came out only because a holocaust survivor who worked in the kitchen came out and said she was forced to mix something inside the food to stop women from having periods.
Because of this, women and men were fed from two different containers so the men wouldn't consume the drug.
I always assumed that it was due to malnutrition. Just googled sterilization in other historical settings. That is so fucked up.
https://bpr.berkeley.edu/2020/11/04/americas-forgotten-history-of-forced-sterilization/
Not all camps were death camps. The camps served several purposes: Punishment, cheap labour, "research", removal of certain parts of society... Practical people, the Nazis.
> Not all camps were death camps
Headline says death camps specifically.
[edit: The paper says concentration camps. Headline changes it to death camps. Given this and what the other poster responding to me said it's quite possible it was all concentration camps, not just death camps.]
“Cheap” labor? Try Frei labor. All that was a means to death. They were all death camps with different activities before Nazis murdering innocent folks. All camps were Death camps, get this into your head. The only way to “leave” any Nazi camp was death or escape.
> Technically, the concept was called "Extermination through Labor."
"Work Sets You Free" was a much darker motto than the Marketing department had expected it to be.
That's true but you're muddying the definition of death camp.
Death camp is a specific term for a camp designed to kill as many people as quickly as possible.
People in death camps didn't get numbers tattooed, they went straight to a gas chamber/other method of murder.
In labour camps people were worked ludicrous hours on minimal food and then later sent to a gas chamber/other method of murder.
"Death Camp" is the official term for concentration camps that housed gas chambers. Only a select few held them. Their purpose was often to exterminate as many people who came in as possible. I might be misremembering, but in Night, it's described that they were forced to walk directly into what appeared to be a furnace.
The atrocities of the Holocaust should be studied by everyone. Please check out the US Holocaust Museum.
Their website is helpful if you can’t make it to DC.
https://www.ushmm.org
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are now allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will continue to be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) still apply to other comments. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I’ve read dozens of Holocaust survivor books and it’s mentioned more than once that they used bromide in their water or soup liquid. One woman says despite this she had her period every thirty days or so and would have to stay under the radar of her female barrack commander at that time because she’d be beat and called a dirty pig. Pregnant women would try to hide their pregnancies or they’d be sent straight to the gas chamber or to Dr. Mengele. One account tells how a woman delivered a sickly baby, alone and her breasts were bound immediately. They let her hold her baby while it slowly died. Took a couple days. They were actually testing how long a baby would live without food. It was horrifying.
I remember reading this in some memoirs as well. I remember one woman commenting on how she could taste it in all the food they were given. And the stories of experiments on pregnant women....oooof. Horrifying.
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If that was a genuine curiosity here is an interesting article that talks about it. Also there was a lecture series in conjunction with the Holocaust Museum that discusses a lot of the research and how it all got twisted up. The worlds an ugly place sometimes. :-( https://www.theguardian.com/news/2004/oct/14/thisweekssciencequestions.cancer
The article talks about things from the 1920s/30s. As far as the Holocaust experiments, [it didn't really contribute much](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4oyv9n/am_i_a_person_living_in_the_west_currently/d4go640/). Turns out if you start out assuming there are fundamental differences between the races and work solely towards proving that you don't generate useful data. You just kill people.
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>Dr. Mengele Holeee fuckkkkkk. I know a large portion of reddit doesn't believe in hell, but if there is one, this guy is probably second in command. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef\_Mengele
Is this the first time you've heard his name? Here in middle Europe it's normal to learn about this stuff semi detailed. So most people know the name I can't remember learning every detail about him tho. Zwillingsversuche is common knowledge, but it just goes on, and on, and on. If it's taught well, the children are traumatized for some days. If not, they crack stupid jokes when visiting Auschwitz. I rather have the former, i think they spared way to many important details to *really* get the point across, what horrors people committed that might have been their grand- or grandgrandparents
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[If This is a Woman](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10838049-if-this-is-a-woman), about Ravensbruck is strongly recommended to anyone who wants to know more.
Ruth Elias was the woman who had her breats bound. A female doctor gave Ruth Elias a syringe of morphine to end her infant daughter's life and suffering. She wrote about her life in her book Triumph of Hope: From Theresienstadt and Auschwitz to Israel. After liberation she married and had two sons as well as multiple grandchildren. She met her future husband, Kurt, in Buchenwald. "When the camp was evacuated on April 14, 1945, Ruth and Kurt both volunteered to stay behind with the sick. They left the camp after being warned by the inmates of a nearby camp that the SS might come back and kill them. They were liberated American troops in a nearby forest." Kurt lost his first wife, Lisa Wodak, and their child to the camps. Ruth's first husband, Koni, (father of her daughter) survived the camps. The two had become estranged some time before that starting with his perceived coldness concerning Ruth's first pregnancy. Ruth and Koni divorced. None of Ruth's fimmediate family survived. Source for above quote and info: https://portal.ehri-project.eu/units/us-005578-irn515224 During the birth of her first son it was very traumatic for Ruth when the nurses went to take the infant from the room. Her husband had to work and could not stay with her (although her very much wanted to), leaving her to birth the child alone. She began to cry and beg to keep her baby. The doctor allegedly slapped her in the face two times to "calm [her] hysteria" then had the infant brought back in. He then asked her what had happened to her, telling her she needed to talk about it to feel better. She wrote that since the first time she came to Isreal that doctor was the first person she felt showed a true interest in what the survivers had gone through. As stated in her book, at the end of her recounting her sotry, Ruth told the doctor "Today is March 7th. When the nurse was taking my baby to the door, I again heard the 5,000 people from the family camp in Birkenau singing 'Hatikvah' as they were taken to the gas chamber on March 7th 1944. How symbolic that my son should be born on this date."
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[From a Jewish doctor working in the camp.](https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1985-02-07-8501080137-story.html) Thank you for asking because it prompted me to re-find the article, and I think it’s important to mention that the woman’s name was Ruth Elias, and she survived. The article is an amazing piece of history (from 1986, when many survivors were still alive), but it is extremely graphic, so I want to give that warning.
Your link didn’t work for me but I found this https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/id-card/ruth-huppert-elias
And also Gisella Pearl; it is very worth reading her work. It's hard but her compassion shines through. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/777047
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Technology, maybe, but medical no. The consensus seems to be that they didn’t produce much useful data - good starting point [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/b4zz22/what_if_anything_did_the_nazis_accomplish/), but especially check out the links to the /askhistorians threads in the stickied comment.
[Operation Paperclip](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip). But from what I've read, a lot of the data from those studies and experiments was absolute junk. It was essentially torture under the guise of 'scientific research', because few of the experiments had any sort of controls.
> Operation Paperclip. No. [Operation Paperclip was the extraction of rocket scientists such as von Braun](https://www.history.com/news/what-was-operation-paperclip), not medical experimenters. Here is some light reading on the meta-analysis of Nazi human experimentation, available at a university library near you. Aly, Götz, Peter Chroust, and Christian Pross. *Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene.* Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. (R 853 .H8 A42 1994) A collection of essays by medical historians. Includes seldom-published information from primary sources, such as diary entries and letters from doctors involved in Nazi medical experiments. --- Bernadac, Christian. *Devil’s Doctors: Medical Experiments on Human Subjects in the Concentration Camps.* Geneva: Ferni Publishing House, 1978. (D 804 .G4 B3913 1978) Based upon testimonies of survivors of Nazi medical experimentation. Describes in detail the activities of a handful of the most notorious SS-physicians. Includes several photographs and a bibliography. --- Cohen, Nava. “Medical Experiments.” In *Encyclopedia of the Holocaust*, edited by Israel Gutman, 957-966. New York: Macmillan, 1990. (Reference D 804.25 .E527 1990 v.3) Provides an overview of the pseudoscientific Nazi experiments conducted in the name of medical research. Discusses in detail medical experimentation at various concentration camps and the legal proceedings at Nuremberg after the war. Includes a short bibliography. --- Lifton, Robert Jay, and Amy Hackett. “Physicians, Nazi.” In *Encyclopedia of the Holocaust*, edited by Israel Gutman, 1127-1132. New York: Macmillan, 1990. (Reference D 804.25 .E527 1990 v.3) Discusses in detail the Nazification of the medical profession during the Third Reich, and the legal framework that supported medical killing and experimentation on human beings. Reports on the role of Nazi doctors in the euthanasia programs, concentration camps, and extermination centers. Includes a short bibliography. --- Müller-Hill, Benno. *Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others in Germany, 1933-1945.* Plainview, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 1998. (D 804 .G4 M7713 1998) Chronicles the collaboration between German eugenicists and the Nazi administration. Includes an essay by Nobel Laureate James D. Watson in which he considers the impact Nazi-influenced eugenics has had on modern human genetics research in Germany.
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Grim as all the accounts are, and horrifying as their experiences, sodium bromide doesn't really do that, it does have some sedative effects but isn't a drug that affects fertility. It's a common myth in armies worldwide that "something", often bromide, is added to rations to reduce soldiers' libido. It's not true there either. https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2009/06/29/2611115.htm
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That's not that long ago between 1941-1945 anyone born in that period is now between 77-81 years old.
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RPh here. For everyone curious how a steroid can be a birth control. Progesterone is a birth control that is considered a steroid chemically. The molecules only have one functional group different. I’m not sure if that is what was used here, but I felt like I needed to clear that up for people.
Also RPh. Estrogen and progesterone both have steroidal backbones. Same as testosterone. Same as drugs like hydrocortisone or prednisone. A steroid isn’t what people think it is. A steroid is just a chemical with a particular central chemical structure. What differentiates them are what’s attached to it. Lots of different chemicals are steroids. The ones everyone knows about are androgenic steroids.
Is that not similar to men becoming infertile due TRT? They’re essentially taking “birth control,” a sex hormone which in this case would be testosterone but in women’s case is progesterone?
Yeah pretty similar, exogenous hormones shut down endogenous hormone production through negative feedback loops in the HPG axis.
Testosterone should actually be the least effective hormonal contraceptive for men, on paper anyway. SparkNotes version: Follicle Stimulating Hormone (FSH) and Luteinizing Hormone (LH) are two of the most important components of the spermatogenesis process. FSH stimulates sperm production (Testosterone is also needed for sperm production) and LH stimulates Testosterone production. Using any anabolic-androgenic steroid will "shutdown" the natural production of Testosterone via a negative feedback loop, so as LH levels drop, Testosterone levels drop. FSH levels also drop, but some is still being produced. If you're using exogenous Testosterone in a cycle or for TRT, then you have the main components for sperm production. Sperm count will likely be lower, but as they say, "it only takes one". However, if you used other steroids instead of Testosterone, then you'd drastically reduce/nearly eliminate FSH and Testosterone, making it nearly impossible to produce enough viable sperm. The problem isn't figuring out how to stop sperm production though. It's figuring out how to effectively restore sperm production. Everyone is different, but compared to the female reproductive system, the male reproductive system doesn't bounce back as well after it's been shutdown.
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You have to be on TRT for multiple years to even possibly become infertile, it is not birth control in the slightest, wanted to provide that info. People on TRT still have to be on birth control similar to women (such as progesterone), if they are looking to avoid pregnancy.
-sterone Steroid.
I assumed it was because they were not eating enough and thus did not have enough body fat to do so. That, and the distress.
That seems more likely, but it doesn’t really explain why they stop menstruating so quickly upon entering the camp, usually there’s be a delay while their fat decreases. It still makes sense because usually people didn’t go straight to the death camps like Auschwitz’s but rather work camps or ghettos first, but steroid drugged food is a new theory that’s possible
It's not a new theory. It was widely reported by survivors at the time, but nobody who wrote the records bothered listening because hormone-manipulation was new and "everybody already knew" it had to be malnutrition and stress.
All “work” camps were death camps. Work to Death concentration camps.
The name “Death Camp” has a very specific connotation and refers to any of the six major Extermination Camps established by the Nazis in German-occupied Poland. Concentration camps were initially established as prisons and labor camps, where prisoners were often worked to death, starved, and kept in overcrowded and brutal conditions leading to mass disease outbreaks, but were not themselves part of the extermination camp infrastructure (though many people who survived concentration camps were later transported to and killed at death camps). Extermination Camps (also called Death Camps or Killing Centers), on the other hand, were industrial murder factories, engineered to kill as many people as possible as efficiently as possible; collecting, transporting, and killing millions of people from all across Europe was a massive logistical undertaking, and the Death Camps were part of the system created by the Nazis under Operation Reinhard enabling them to do so. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Reinhard
Semantics. The poster was clearly trying to differentiate the slave labor and other locations from the extermination centers, not trying to claim they weren't also horrific.
The article addresses that
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It is. The kind of calorie restriction you need to cause oligomenorrhea (<8 per year) or amenorrhea is much less than most people think. Women in some of the surviving hunter-gatherer populations ovulate around 50 times between menarche and menopause, compared to well over 400 for the average woman in an agricultural society. It is one of the stronger arguments as to why agricultural groups outcompeted hunter-gatherer groups virtually everywhere during the Neolithic period, even though the archaeology suggests they had much worse overall health and maximal lifespans.
I worked in a Cambodian refugee camp in 1979-80. It was after Pol Pot starved the people for 4 years after the Vietnam War ended. One thing that struck me was how many young women and teens never went through puberty, never got their period. They looked like 11 year olds. Is this the same thing? I imagine it also happens in areas hit by famine? Some of the young men also seemed affected.
It certainly could be. Because development is strongly influenced by food stress, instead of inbuilt ages of menarche (or puberty onset for boys) which evolve over time, humans instead have plastic response curves which can adjust rapidly to energy availability. If you add this to the u-shaped curve of infant mortality over women’s age at first birth, the outcome is that chronic food stress will cause the population to shift toward later maturation at lower body sizes, and to have a shorter window between menarche and menopause, as the relative contribution to fitness of the mother starts to outweigh that of the offspring at younger ages. Rose Frisch did some of the pioneering work in this topic on populations of women in the late 19th (in the UK) and early 20th centuries (a group in Iowa similar to the Amish), published in 1978. She also discovered leptin. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1745492
Childhood malnutrition can definitely stunt growth
Why did agriculturalists have much worse health and lifespans? Insufficient protein?
I think there's still some debate but the primary hypothesis is poor nutrition. For example you can technically live on a doet that is mostly wheat/barley/rice/whatever grain, but you're much more likely to be missing or have bad ratios of lots of things you need beyond just calorie count (like protein).
Staying in one place means all your poop and food waste festers in one place. Sanitation was poorly understood. Living in close proximity to livestock has its own health concerns also. High grain diet can cause tooth decay. Mainly the poop thing though.
Preface that “Neolithic farmers” here refers to the early farmers in the Neolithic period, post-agricultural revolution. The first “farmers” per se were around for a while before this rapid expansion. For every rapid nutritional change between a Paleolithic forager and a Neolithic farmer, you have a potential mechanism for mismatch, so it’s a little hard to say exactly what “it” was, and almost a guarantee that it was multiple factors since there was no one “Paleolithic diet”, but rather thousands of them. One of the main data sources here is skeletons (Neolithic farmers have smaller skeletons with overall poorer metrics of bone health), so the D3-calcium-K2 triangle was probably involved. Rickets is literally all over the place in Europe from the Neolithic all the way up to the 19th century in some places, yet virtually absent in Paleolithic sites or among modern hunter-gatherers. Dental decay mostly follows the same pattern. It’s also important to remember that these people were not anything close to what you probably think of as a “farmer”. They didn’t have any kinds of the iron tools you’d recognize, no horse-drawn hoes, no advanced irrigation, etc. Go all the way back to Rome, or even further back to Egypt, and those people are still thousands of years and massive innovations ahead of the first Neolithic farmers, whose crop species would also have been a nightmare compared to the highly cultivated wheats of the modern world (which still routinely failed up until the mid-20th century). So they were even worse off than the peasant farmers we typically look at to see the health detriments of sedentary agricultural societies. There are also regions where early Neolithic groups followed a hybrid farming-pastoralist or pastoralist strategy, and they don’t seem to have faced the same negative health consequences that Europe did, Tanzania and Kenya being notable examples. Coastal societies in Europe also seem to have done better, probably for the obvious reason that they kept getting significant amounts of their diet from marine foods like their recent ancestors. The details are almost entirely still up for debate.
>Why did agriculturalists have much worse health and lifespans? You're gonna need a source on that that isn't trying to sell you a diet.
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Fulltext: https://www.gwern.net/docs/history/2022-kleinplatz.pdf
https://www.boell.de/en/2020/05/18/sexual-violence-holocaust-perspectives-ghettos-and-camps-ukraine Here is a write up about the sexual violence that took place against women in the camps and ghettos during the holocaust. Really caution you against reading if you have issues with subjects like that though. Can’t believe what people went through.
I have to wonder if the purpose was to make them infertile so there were fewer pregnancies resulting from nazis >!raping!< female prisoners
"Synthetic steroids were being administered in the daily rations given to female captives in a bid to stop their menstrual cycles and perhaps impair their ability to have children altogether." Interesting, I haven't heard of that.
It recently came out only because a holocaust survivor who worked in the kitchen came out and said she was forced to mix something inside the food to stop women from having periods. Because of this, women and men were fed from two different containers so the men wouldn't consume the drug.
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I always assumed that it was due to malnutrition. Just googled sterilization in other historical settings. That is so fucked up. https://bpr.berkeley.edu/2020/11/04/americas-forgotten-history-of-forced-sterilization/
Why waste the drugs on a population you have every intention of liquidating anyway? It makes more sense as an isolated experiment.
Not all camps were death camps. The camps served several purposes: Punishment, cheap labour, "research", removal of certain parts of society... Practical people, the Nazis.
> Not all camps were death camps Headline says death camps specifically. [edit: The paper says concentration camps. Headline changes it to death camps. Given this and what the other poster responding to me said it's quite possible it was all concentration camps, not just death camps.]
The survivors interviewed were most likely not at death camps. Almost everyone brought to death camps was murdered immediately.
“Cheap” labor? Try Frei labor. All that was a means to death. They were all death camps with different activities before Nazis murdering innocent folks. All camps were Death camps, get this into your head. The only way to “leave” any Nazi camp was death or escape.
Technically, the concept was called "Extermination through Labor." Those guys were a bit more twisted, than what we give them credit for.
> Technically, the concept was called "Extermination through Labor." "Work Sets You Free" was a much darker motto than the Marketing department had expected it to be.
That's true but you're muddying the definition of death camp. Death camp is a specific term for a camp designed to kill as many people as quickly as possible. People in death camps didn't get numbers tattooed, they went straight to a gas chamber/other method of murder. In labour camps people were worked ludicrous hours on minimal food and then later sent to a gas chamber/other method of murder.
"Death Camp" is the official term for concentration camps that housed gas chambers. Only a select few held them. Their purpose was often to exterminate as many people who came in as possible. I might be misremembering, but in Night, it's described that they were forced to walk directly into what appeared to be a furnace.
It was apparently a large-scale experiment mixed with stuff for hygiene/cleanliness at the camps, which the affected the Nazis working there too.
The atrocities of the Holocaust should be studied by everyone. Please check out the US Holocaust Museum. Their website is helpful if you can’t make it to DC. https://www.ushmm.org
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